Glazed & Diffused is a survey exhibition focused on a select group of international artists, from George Ohr (b. 1857) to several mid-career artists chosen from the exhibition Ceramic Top 40. These artists use fired clay and glaze pigment to convey abstract content. Their sculpture, objects, vessels, tile, and site-specific installations reveal intended, abstract results using fluidity, abstraction, and color theory.

Curator Leslie Ferrin commented, “Over the course of my career, I have witnessed both the emergence of abstract clay sculpture in the late 1950s and 60s and its re-emergence as a fine art trend fully integrated into contemporary art market. In 2015 fine artists are regularly creating objects and sculpture in clay alongside their works in painting and various other mediums, and likewise their galleries are mounting solo and group exhibitions inclusive of ceramics.

“Within encyclopedic museums, the permanent collections and period rooms are offering new contexts for contemporary ceramic art to be considered both chronologically and thematically alongside parallel artwork in all media. The “Dirt on Delight” exhibition presented in 2009 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, was the important seminal museum survey that ignited interest and marked the moment when ceramics not only garnered the attention of New York’s illustrious art critics, such as Roberta Smith, but also that of the Chelsea galleries who began to focus attention on a younger generation alongside the known masters of the medium — Viola Frey, Betty Woodman, Peter Voulkos, Ken Price and Robert Arneson.

“Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay,” curated by Ingrid Shaffner and Jenelle Porter, was accompanied by a catalog that included Glenn Adamson’s essay “Sloppy Seconds: The Strange Return of Clay.” Since that moment, curators have turned their sights towards ceramics in survey exhibitions organized during Pacific Time in California, by Crystal Bridges, the Venice Biennale, and the Whitney Biennial. (In 2014, the Whitney Biennial featured sculpture by ceramic master John Mason alongside younger counterparts who have only recently aligned with the medium.)”

Spanning eight weeks this summer, Glazed and Diffused will bring attention to the lively dialogue surrounding the dissolution of categorical constraints in institutions and the art market through programming that includes panel discussions, DISH + DINE events and Artist Salons.

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June 20 –

Collograph Constructions by Sarah Amos, a master printmaker from Australia whose award-winning work is garnering critical attention from both international curators and collectors, opens Collograph Constructions, a show of radical new works on felt.